In modern dairy farm industry there are continuous research and development activities in order to improve the efficiency of various activities such as machine milking, which, inter alia, involves increased milk yield and reduced milking time.
A major trend in this respect is an increased degree of automation of the various activities. For instance, machine milking may be performed by milking robots in a completely automated manner. Such an automatic milking system may take care of milking, feeding, milk sampling, animal traffic, etcetera in a large area wherein the dairy animals are walking about freely and are visiting the milking machine on a voluntary basis.
In order to manage a herd of dairy animals, including selection of milking animals and of breeding animals, feeding, detection of illnesses, etcetera, it is important to monitor the quantity and quality of milk produced at a milking facility on an average level, on a cow-individual basis and even on a teat-individual basis. To this end milk samples are representatively taken from the milk produced by a herd of cows, by a single cow, or by a single teat, and are sent to a laboratory for analysis on regular time basis, e.g. once or a few times a month. The result of the analysis (e.g. contents of fat, protein, bacteria, and spores, and somatic cell count values) are typically provided some days or weeks later and appropriate actions are taken based on said results.
Further, the dairy farmer is paid for the milk produced based on such results, particularly the contents of fat and protein.
In order to render the milk production more effective the milking robots may be equipped with uncomplicated milk inspection units, e.g. conductance meters and optic sensors, for measurement of some quality parameters on-site in real time. It is foreseen that such on-site measuring equipment will become more and more sophisticated as well as more and more common in the near future.
However, such milk measuring equipment nevertheless has to be of low cost such that the milk producers will invest in such equipment. One drawback of such approach, however, is that such on-site measuring equipment may not provide accurate, precise and reliable measurements, and thus, such measurements may not be valuable to the milk producer.